Bill Gates fund donates $18 million to fight tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea

The fund set up by billionaire Bill Gates will donate $18 million to fight rampant tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea.

The donation, officially signed off in Port Moresby on Monday, is the largest ever cash grant to charity organisation World Vision Australia and will contribute to a PNG government strategy in all 22 provinces aiming to halve infection rates.

Soba holds her son Sawai Naruwa, who has lost the use of his legs as a result of tuberculosis in Daru in 2011. Credit:Jason South

PNG has the second-highest rate of tuberculosis infections in the region, behind Cambodia.

The debilitating disease is compounded because of an overlap with HIV infections, with nearly of quarter of patients suffering tuberculosis in PNG also HIV positive.

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Patients suffering from tuberculosis at the paediatric ward of the Port Moresby hospital in 2009.Credit:Jason South

"We all know TB is a curable disease, not like HIV, so every effort needs to be made to save lives," said World Vision's PNG country director Curt von Boguslawski.

An estimated 30,000 new cases of tuberculosis are now diagnosed each year in PNG, with drug resistant strains of the disease on the rise. About one in four infections are in children.

But Dr Boguslawski said the number was actually a good sign, with poor collection of health data meaning only 5000 cases were detected five years ago.

"If you don't have the detection, it means you can't treat," he said.

PNG has previously struggled to track the prevalence of tuberculosis, an infectious disease that typically targets the lungs and spreads easily in crowded households.

Mr Gates has recently set an ambitious target, or "bet", for his charity work, that "the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history".

The $18 million grant in PNG is by the Global Fund, an organisation the billionaire Microsoft founder helped create in 2002 as a partnership of governments, charities and the private sector to combat the "big three" diseases of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

The donation in PNG, to be spent over three years, includes $4 million to strengthen diagnostic testing in laboratories in the country and quality control for drugs.

The bulk of the money will go towards training medical personnel and supply of drugs under a $50 million local program to fight tuberculosis in Australia's closest neighbour.

World Vision will also contribute $4 million over three years towards, with the aim to halve the infection rate by 2020.

Daniel Flitton is senior correspondent for The Age covering foreign affairs and politics. He is a former intelligence analyst for the Australian government and was at one-time a university lecturer specialising in international relations.